Unhandled Exception!Supervillain Plan

No, we are not weird. It is just that the rest of the world ignores the problem. They get worried when an hour goes missing or turns up unexpectedly when a DST changeover happens. But weknow where it goes!

More cartoon fun at xkcd a webcomic of romance,sarcasm, math, and language

Programming News and Views

Active State has released the latest versions of it cross-platform Komodo IDE and its free open-source counterpart Komodo EDIT. Komodo IDE 11 now features Smart and responsive autocomplete and symbol browser for faster overall performance.

Developers are adopting new streaming data frameworks and turning to microservices to meet the need to use data faster according to a report from Lightbend presented at today's Strata Data Conference being held in New York.

Facebook has, very reasonably, given into pressure from all sides to change the licence of many of its open source project from the contentious BSD+patents to the more familiar and friendly MIT License.

The latest version of Mathematica and the Wolfram language have been released. Version 11.2 improves the options for audio and image processing, as well as adding more functions for mathematical computation, task handling and machine learning.

It is one thing to know that something unlikely is Turing complete; it is quite another to use it to build a computer and then implement something real. This is exactly what has just happened with Conway's Game Of Life with the construction of a computer to play Tetris. This is a remarkable achievement that should send your brain into a tailspin.

The newly unveiled Matternet Station, together with Matternet's cloud platform and its autonomous M2 drones, is a viable solution for delivering small payloads where speed is essential. Its latest demonstration is in delivering vital medical supplies.

As well as sifting through the news, the IProgrammer team does the same for books, selecting titles for Book Watch and for review. We also bring you articles. This week's are on handling negative numbers in binary and building a Weblogic WS-Security enabled clinet on the CLI.

A "Game of Codes" online competition with $20K in prizes is underway, ending on September 24. There is still plenty of opportunity to win a $50 gift card and the number of points required to win one of 500 tee-shirts has been reduced to 5.

If you need convincing that WebAssembly is going to change the way we program web apps take a look at WebSight which shows that it is twenty times faster than JavaScript at a face detection task and twice as fast as asm.js

There is no doubt that bots are a growing problem, but perhaps it is a bigger problem than any of us imagine. Researchers have discovered a Twitter botnet with over 500,000 bots, and it isn't a simple one.

One of the problems with neural networks is how long it takes to train them. Researchers have just smashed the training barrier by reducing the time to train ResNet from 14 days to one hour and have claimed a world record of 24 minutes for AlexNet with a lower hardware budget than used for the task by Facebook.

Reporting findings of a survey that some will find controversial, Stack Overflow suggests that developers are increasingly unlikely to recoup the cost of a university education. Stack Overflow urges those hiring to include details of salary in job listings and remove educational requirements in order to attract more applicants.

Kotlin is attracting attention as "a better Java" especially since Google backed it as a language for Android development. In this book, some chapters of which you can read on this site, Mike James introduces Kotlin to programmers. You don't have to be an expert programmer in Java or any other language, but you need to know the basics of programming and using objects.

This book, subtitled "Obey the Testing Goat: Using Django, Selenium, and JavaScript" is the second edition of a hands-on guide to the practical advantages of test-driven development (TDD) with Python. Author Harry Percival shows how to write and run tests before building each part of your app, and then develop the minimum amount of code required to pass those tests.

This book is a collection of 50 intermediate-to-advanced techniques for writing robust and well-performing C# 7.0 code. Reflecting the growing sophistication of the C# language and its development community, author Bill Wagner presents new solutions to problems you are likely to encounter every day. This second edition has been completely reorganized to provide clear explanations, expert tips, and realistic code examples in a cohesive package for modern C#, covering C# 7.0.

Computers for Seniors is a step-by-step guide designed for older people that will take them all the way from pressing the 'On' button on a new computer to being a confident user. Authors Carrie Ewin, Cheryl Ewin, and Chris Ewin show how to send emails, shop online safely, read the latest news, use YouTube, share pictures, and check the weather forecast, among other topics.

This practical book aims to help you get to grips with data structures and algorithms in a clear, concise, and engaging way. Author Allen Downey emphasizes practical knowledge and skills over theory and shows how to use data structures to implement efficient algorithms, and then analyze and measure their performance. The book explores the important classes in the Java collections framework (JCF), how they're implemented, and how they're expected to perform.

This book provides an introduction to Angular 2 application development, independent of any exposure to Angular 1.x and is intended for beginners who want to develop Web applications. Author Oswald Campesato shows how to create applications with various UI Controls, how to create custom components, and how to handle mouse-related events.

Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development 2nd Ed (Addison Wesley)Friday 08 Sep

This book covers the techniques and tools needed for designing and developing games. This new edition was written with Unity 2017. Author Jeremy Gibson Bond has spent more than a decade teaching game design and building games, and the book covers game design theory, rapid iterative prototyping, and practical programming.